Ronan O’Malley, 62, has spent the last eight years of his life keeping his world small enough to control. A vintage neon sign restorer by trade, he lives and works out of a cinder block garage tucked between a bait shop and a laundromat in Newport, Oregon, his only regular visitors the group of retired fishermen who hold court at the dive bar down the street. He’s got a scar slashing across his left eyebrow from a glass tube explosion in ‘07, grease permanently crusted under the edges of his fingernails, and a strict rule against letting anyone get close enough to ask personal questions. His ex-wife left him for a real estate agent who played competitive pickleball, his old work partner Manny died in a scaffolding fall a year later, and he decided somewhere along the line that wanting anything more than cold Pacifico and a properly working glass furnace was asking for trouble.
He’s manning a booth at the town’s annual Neon Heritage Festival on a 72-degree Saturday in mid-July, half-drunk beer in one hand, when he sees Lila Marquez walking toward him. He recognizes her immediately, even though the last time he saw her she was 19, wearing a faded high school soccer hoodie and hauling carnitas tacos out to him and Manny at a work site outside Salem. She’s 47 now, sun streaks running through her dark wavy hair, a linen wrap dress the color of sea glass hitting mid-thigh, tan lines crisscrossing her shoulders from hauling lumber for the beach rental cabins she moved back to town to run six months prior. She’s been by his garage three times already, he later learns, to ask him to fix the rotting 1960s “CAPE CABINS” neon sign hanging over her property entrance, and he’d ignored every knock, convinced it was town gossips trying to dig into why he never brought a date to the annual crab feed.
She leans over the edge of the booth to get a closer look at a neon mermaid sign he restored for a local seafood joint, the neck of her dress dipping just enough that he can see the faint silver outline of a seagull tattoo on her collarbone, and he fumbles his beer bottle so bad a splash sloshes over the edge onto his scuffed work boot. She laughs, a low throaty sound that cuts through the noise of the crowd and the high buzz of surrounding neon tubes, and reaches across the booth to swat his arm playfully, her palm warm against the sunburnt skin just above the cuff of his rolled flannel shirt. The contact sends a jolt up his spine, the kind he hasn’t felt since before his divorce, and he has to look away for a second to catch his breath, the salt tang of ocean air sticking to the back of his throat.
He’s torn, for the next hour they talk, between the voice in his head that screams Manny would kill you if he saw you looking at his little sister like that and the part of him that’s been starved for attention that isn’t about neon tube pricing or the best way to remove rust from 50-year-old sign casings. She tells him she’s had a crush on him since she was 17, used to beg Manny to bring her to work sites just so she could see him, thought he was the toughest, quietest guy she’d ever met. He listens, his mouth dry, as she says she’d been nervous to talk to him at first, scared he still saw her as the annoying kid who stole his root beer at every work barbecue.
By the time the festival starts shutting down, the sun dipping low over the ocean and painting the sky streaks of pink and tangerine, they’re standing so close their shoulders brush every time one of them shifts. She smells like coconut sunscreen and the peach hard seltzer she’s been sipping all afternoon, and when she tilts her head up to look at him, her dark eyes glinting in the glow of the neon signs around them, he doesn’t even think about the rules he’s spent eight years living by. He leans down, and she meets him halfway, her hand coming up to curl around the back of his neck, the cool of her silver wave rings a sharp contrast to the heat of his sun-warmed skin. The kiss is slow, unrushed, no messy fumbling or urgency, just the quiet shock of two people who’ve been waiting for something they didn’t think they were allowed to have.
He doesn’t say anything for a few seconds after they pull away, just laces his calloused fingers through hers, the rough pads of his fingers from decades of bending hot glass matching the calluses on hers from fixing deck railings and carrying suitcases for her rental guests. He tells her he’s got a pile of old sea-foam green neon tubing back at his garage that would be perfect for her cabin sign, if she wants to come take a look. She grins, squeezing his hand, and says she thought he’d never ask. They walk slow down the splintered wooden boardwalk, the sound of the waves crashing against the shore behind them, the distant hum of the festival’s leftover neon signs lighting the path back to his garage.
